Sometimes sacred cows need to be slaughtered. But when that is the case, I will do it by my hand, not hope for a deity or circumstance to do the job for me.
Once again, where's the harm? The original poster merely noted the obvious. In too many places, the public sector has grown fat at the expense of what makes modern civilizations, the private sector.
I think the term for this is psychological projection.
As to total ignorance, it's worth noting that "socialism for the rich" works so much better when someone controls as you originally suggested (recall you complained about "unlimited ownership and no cap on profits") who can be rich. At least with capitalist systems, the only restriction is access to capital, which is a much smaller hurdle than being able to navigate some dysfunctional socialist government in order to be one of the recognized elites who can control unlimited amounts of capital and have no caps on profits.
Capitalism, you allow unlimited ownership and no cap on profits you end up with a few monopolies or cartels in every industry and the rest are all losers.
And who will enforce these restrictions? Keep in mind that the biggest and baddest monopoly on the block is the government. Give them power to enforce this, and you'll give them extraordinary power to run your life.
Now that people have effectively become apolitical and brainwashed by the corporate media that all that is capitalism is good, we're going back in time because there is no effective political resistance at the moment.
Because Forbes is the only media source out there. I guess it is the nature of delusion to be near completely divorced from the real world.
In the real world, socialism has had a far better run than it deserved. And when it fails as it frequently does, then capitalism, corporations, and other bogey men get blamed. Creating these oligopolies is a great example of a failure of socialism. Complex regulations which allegedly fix problems of externality or unfairness also create effective and legal barriers to entry, reducing competition in an industry.
Similarly, the increased power of governments usually goes along with these efforts. That in turn allows politicians and bureaucrats to profit by picking winners and losers in an industry.
My view is that you got what you wanted. It just turns out to be yet another bad idea.
As an aside, I think I need to comment on this statement.
To be able to make that trade, one cannot be poor and society needs to accomodate this option.
No, society doesn't need to accommodate whatever option you think should exist here. You want something, but aren't willing to offer anything in exchange for it. So someone else has to provide that option for you.
I find this deeply hypocritical and a bit pathological. You want leisure, but to provide that leisure, someone else has to sacrifice their leisure without any sort of compensation from you. And that will hurt society in the long run.
What are you willing to give or do to have this concept?
Work less.
And if you give me $10, I'll take another $10 off your hands. Trade consists of exchanging things of value, not merely taking what you want.
The "leisure society" is about just getting stuff.
No, it is about trading potential stuff for leisure. To be able to make that trade, one cannot be poor and society needs to accomodate this option. This is not quite the case.
What potential stuff? You have yet to offer anything that anyone would consider of value.
The value of labour is in balance with how much blood the leeches can suck out the economy without their victim -- society -- noticing. And with leeches I don't mean unemployed people, nor the government, since they just circulate all the money they get anyway.
The value of labor is what you can do with that labor. And why wouldn't you mean unemployed people who demand free lunch or the government? If we're going to talk of leeches of society, we need to talk of all the leeches of the society, not just the ones you don't like.
They've been buckling ever since the 70s. For example, the United Auto Workers dropped from 1.53 million in 1979 to just over 350 thousand in 2009. The only unions that are thriving are the rent seekers in the public sector.
Thank you for demonstrating so precisely the mental pathology OP was talking about.
A pathology causes harm. A belief that there is no free lunch is helpful (since it is accurate and prevents the believer from attempting a variety of unproductive activities) and hence, not a pathology.
Similarly, deflating the original poster's clueless rant is more or less helpful and hence, not a pathology.
This exactly. I am frankly not surprised that a Forbes article is being promoted as "authoritative" on slashdot
I don't see any such signs of promotion aside from the appearance of the article.
a site that leans libertarian and as such is *heavily* anti-intellectual.
Not sure where you get "anti-intellectual" from. After all, libertarianism's primary opponents are strongly anti-intellectual, believing in such things as the free lunch, throwing money at problems can fix them, or acting on impulses of envy. And how anti-intellectual are such ideas as actually following the rules you make or empowering people by making them responsible for their own actions?
Since this is pretty much a US oriented complaint, it's worth noting two things. First, that there are huge disincentives to hire more people in the US. Second, people want the stuff that they can buy with money and voluntarily work those hours (not just true of the US obviously).
If our technology is so advanced, why do we need to work so much?
Because our work is still valuable. We still haven't been able to destroy the value of human labor, no matter how hard we tried over the past few decades.
What happened to the leisure society concept?
What are you willing to give or do to have this concept? It just sounds to me like you want the benefits of working without actually having to work. But in case you haven't noticed, the world is more about trade, the exchange of things of value.
The "leisure society" is about just getting stuff. That''s fine. I want stuff too. But you have to have some other side to that, namely, what the leisure society can offer in order to get those leisure experiences and goods. For now, the primary thing to offer is labor.
Velocity tends to be mid 20s or higher when they come in. So normal asteroid impacts have something like at least six times as much energy as your above example. And such impacts happen about once every two years as others noted.
I know Venus's atmosphere is much denser but it's 98% CO2, is it really that dense that 3/4 of the Earth's atmosphere would fit into the remaining 2%?
Oh yes, 80 atmospheres of pressure at the Venus surface and it has pretty close to the same gravity profile (a bit less gravitational pull) as Earth does.
Your right, the hardest problem is lack of Hydrogen caused by a runaway greenhouse effect that evaporated the Venusian oceans, the same fate awaits Earth in about half a billion years from now ( much sooner if we burn all the coal as per current plans).
Not at all. There's two things to keep in mind. First, there isn't enough carbon in fossil fuels to do this thing. And even if there was, there isn't enough oxygen. There is probably enough fossil fuels, if one could somehow extract and burn it, to turn the Earth's atmosphere toxic to current human life. But that only takes about 5000 parts per million (0.5% by mass I think).
You can ask questions, but you can also answer them. For example, it doesn't take a lot of research to find out that Earth routinely gets hit by objects of this size. Cities don't make up a huge portion of the Earth's surface area, but if asteroids of this size were cratering the Earth, we'd have noticed it by now.
Surely 4-digit guy you've noticed the massive and growing hordes of libertarians, particularly over the last two years? Those willfully ignorant of everything and proud of it asshats make me miss the creationist hordes we used to have circa 2003.
I think the degree of psychological projection has certainly gotten worse over the years.
It's just the biggest legal problem of all: conflict of interest.
I've seen a number of other such propositions when I was in California dealing with selective legalization of various forms of gambling. All written by the parties that would benefit from the resulting law.
Launching from near the Sun helps, if you have high thrust engines (for example, chemical, a amazingly efficient solar sail, nuclear propulsion, etc). The cause is the Oberth effect where you can get a huge boost from thrusting in a deep gravity well (cues jokes please) as long as you result in a trajectory that achieves escape velocity. It's primarily because you aren't pulling all that propellant out with you.
Unfortunately, current generation electric propulsion isn't high thrust to weight and hence, can't really exploit the Oberth effect very well.
We have certainly altered the biosphere of Earth, intentionally and unintentionally, but I personally wouldnâ(TM)t count that as terraforming in the most colloquial connotation. I get your point, but itâ(TM)s really usurping my comment to make a separate point.
An assertion that something is unlikely to happen is weakened significantly, if it has been done successfully and to considerable advantage elsewhere.
Look at the fall of the DDR and the cost to Germany during unification.
Two things to note. First, much of that cost was spurious, just bad decisions and ineffective spending. Second, Germany has done quite well economically since reunification. Part of it is relative fiscal discipline, but part of it is also having a piece of your country which you can raise from poverty to relative prosperity.
If South Korea can't afford to do that, then it's not the "right thing to do". I have to agree, this is empty moralizing wanking.
They can't do the work to improve their own conditions, when you lack roads to transport bricks or food or plumbing.
It's worth noting here that civilization came from far more primitive conditions than anything found in North Korea. Merely not having roads can be rectified by building roads.
The problem isn't that North Korea isn't capable of improving itself by itself all the way to cutting edge developed world standards. It is after all in a better position technologically and infrastructure-wise, than any developed world country was centuries ago and there are plenty of working examples of viable developed world societies to follow.
But the problem is that North Korea is going in the wrong direction to build such a society.
One of the problems with terraforming Mars (and potentially lots of other rocky, goldilocks zone planets) is the lack of a substantial magnetosphere.
If you're trying to make a nice environment for people to go from Earth, it's a problem. If you're merely trying to get life to thrive on Mars, then it's not a serious issue.The moderately high radioactive environment of Mars just isn't that big an issue (especially compared to the UV enivornment!). The low gravity of Mars does more to strip Mars of atmosphere than the lack of a magnetosphere.
Most likely humans will become largely virtual data based organisms long before we develop the technology or focused the resources on things like terraforming planets.
We already terraformed Earth. Agriculture and urbanization both make huge swathes of Earth more habitable for humans (which really should be the definition of terraforming not making something more like arbitrary Earth environments which in themselves need not be particularly nice environments. Nor is there a reason to expect that that the process can't be largely automated (to avoid the need for billions of human laborers making things happen).
There's some serious work here as well. Say I want my payload in a particular orbit, but I don't know how to get it there. A launch services provider could figure out some vehicle choices given my needs, calculate the trajectory and burns that would work, negotiate the launch contract and time on the launch pad, handle the packaging and delivery of the payload to the launch site, integrate payload onto a live rocket, and monitor the launch through to the desired trajectory.
Even SpaceX probably will end up doing a lot of work for third party launch service providers like Lockheed. It makes things simpler for SpaceX as well since all they have to do is provide the rocket.
I agree with Chuckstar here. Launches have always been automated. There's too much happening too fast and too far away from any potential human controller for human control to make any sort of sense.
The only sort of human control I've heard of is in the guidance of various sorts of missiles and other ordnance in the battlefield. For example, wire guided missiles (which are controlled by someone sitting right at the launch point) and target painting (where a spotter lights up in some way the designated target).
Those were different issues than copyright though.
I'd agree that they're different approaches. But different issues? I'm not sure of that. It seems to me that we have the same obvious problem that secondary markets drive down the price which people are willing to pay on the primary market.
So actors and reasons may be different (the policies I mentioned were implemented by political actors on behalf, presumably of the parties which were trying to reduce the effect of the secondary markets). But overall, it seems the same strategies apply.
If this were extended to homes as well then moving into a home would mean that's where you're going to live for the rest of your life (unless you have enough money to buy a 2nd or 3rd home).
It would mean a move to a disposable home. I think that would be horribly wasteful and hideously expensive for the homeowner, but it'd be easy street for the homebuilders. And to a modest extent, it does happen. Some bad home owners do pretty much destroy their homes and move on. And most homes aren't built to last more than a few decades.
Not arguing that classical music benefits hugely from having a good sound system set up, but I will argue that *good* rock/hip hop will benefit from a good sound system just as much. Any music that takes advantage of dynamic and acoustic ranges will benefit from a sound system that's capable of reproducing it.
You got me. I have to agree with that. Maybe some sort of drums solo or organ music. It's hard to get dynamic range with some instruments.
There's a pretty good argument that the core difference between spacex and the defense contractors is spacex is giving up hope, at a very basic level, of selling ICBMs to dotmil.
I disagree. The US hasn't made any new missiles since the Peacekeeper. That's about twenty years of no selling of ICBMs. Lockheed doesn't even have a rocket at the moment (the Atlas V is operated by ULA, which Lockheed is a part owner of).
My take is that Lockheed's niche here is launch services. If you want your payload in space, at some point, you're going to have to put it on a rocket. That's a very specialized task. And the period from launch through to successful deployment in the right trajectory remains one of the riskiest parts of a mission.
Slashdot Mirror
Sometimes sacred cows need to be slaughtered. But when that is the case, I will do it by my hand, not hope for a deity or circumstance to do the job for me.
Once again, where's the harm? The original poster merely noted the obvious. In too many places, the public sector has grown fat at the expense of what makes modern civilizations, the private sector.
I think the term for this is psychological projection.
As to total ignorance, it's worth noting that "socialism for the rich" works so much better when someone controls as you originally suggested (recall you complained about "unlimited ownership and no cap on profits") who can be rich. At least with capitalist systems, the only restriction is access to capital, which is a much smaller hurdle than being able to navigate some dysfunctional socialist government in order to be one of the recognized elites who can control unlimited amounts of capital and have no caps on profits.
Capitalism, you allow unlimited ownership and no cap on profits you end up with a few monopolies or cartels in every industry and the rest are all losers.
And who will enforce these restrictions? Keep in mind that the biggest and baddest monopoly on the block is the government. Give them power to enforce this, and you'll give them extraordinary power to run your life.
Now that people have effectively become apolitical and brainwashed by the corporate media that all that is capitalism is good, we're going back in time because there is no effective political resistance at the moment.
Because Forbes is the only media source out there. I guess it is the nature of delusion to be near completely divorced from the real world.
In the real world, socialism has had a far better run than it deserved. And when it fails as it frequently does, then capitalism, corporations, and other bogey men get blamed. Creating these oligopolies is a great example of a failure of socialism. Complex regulations which allegedly fix problems of externality or unfairness also create effective and legal barriers to entry, reducing competition in an industry.
Similarly, the increased power of governments usually goes along with these efforts. That in turn allows politicians and bureaucrats to profit by picking winners and losers in an industry.
My view is that you got what you wanted. It just turns out to be yet another bad idea.
To be able to make that trade, one cannot be poor and society needs to accomodate this option.
No, society doesn't need to accommodate whatever option you think should exist here. You want something, but aren't willing to offer anything in exchange for it. So someone else has to provide that option for you.
I find this deeply hypocritical and a bit pathological. You want leisure, but to provide that leisure, someone else has to sacrifice their leisure without any sort of compensation from you. And that will hurt society in the long run.
What are you willing to give or do to have this concept?
Work less.
And if you give me $10, I'll take another $10 off your hands. Trade consists of exchanging things of value, not merely taking what you want.
The "leisure society" is about just getting stuff.
No, it is about trading potential stuff for leisure. To be able to make that trade, one cannot be poor and society needs to accomodate this option. This is not quite the case.
What potential stuff? You have yet to offer anything that anyone would consider of value.
The value of labour is in balance with how much blood the leeches can suck out the economy without their victim -- society -- noticing. And with leeches I don't mean unemployed people, nor the government, since they just circulate all the money they get anyway.
The value of labor is what you can do with that labor. And why wouldn't you mean unemployed people who demand free lunch or the government? If we're going to talk of leeches of society, we need to talk of all the leeches of the society, not just the ones you don't like.
They've been buckling ever since the 70s. For example, the United Auto Workers dropped from 1.53 million in 1979 to just over 350 thousand in 2009. The only unions that are thriving are the rent seekers in the public sector.
Thank you for demonstrating so precisely the mental pathology OP was talking about.
A pathology causes harm. A belief that there is no free lunch is helpful (since it is accurate and prevents the believer from attempting a variety of unproductive activities) and hence, not a pathology.
Similarly, deflating the original poster's clueless rant is more or less helpful and hence, not a pathology.
This exactly. I am frankly not surprised that a Forbes article is being promoted as "authoritative" on slashdot
I don't see any such signs of promotion aside from the appearance of the article.
a site that leans libertarian and as such is *heavily* anti-intellectual.
Not sure where you get "anti-intellectual" from. After all, libertarianism's primary opponents are strongly anti-intellectual, believing in such things as the free lunch, throwing money at problems can fix them, or acting on impulses of envy. And how anti-intellectual are such ideas as actually following the rules you make or empowering people by making them responsible for their own actions?
If our technology is so advanced, why do we need to work so much?
Because our work is still valuable. We still haven't been able to destroy the value of human labor, no matter how hard we tried over the past few decades.
What happened to the leisure society concept?
What are you willing to give or do to have this concept? It just sounds to me like you want the benefits of working without actually having to work. But in case you haven't noticed, the world is more about trade, the exchange of things of value.
The "leisure society" is about just getting stuff. That''s fine. I want stuff too. But you have to have some other side to that, namely, what the leisure society can offer in order to get those leisure experiences and goods. For now, the primary thing to offer is labor.
Velocity tends to be mid 20s or higher when they come in. So normal asteroid impacts have something like at least six times as much energy as your above example. And such impacts happen about once every two years as others noted.
I know Venus's atmosphere is much denser but it's 98% CO2, is it really that dense that 3/4 of the Earth's atmosphere would fit into the remaining 2%?
Oh yes, 80 atmospheres of pressure at the Venus surface and it has pretty close to the same gravity profile (a bit less gravitational pull) as Earth does.
Your right, the hardest problem is lack of Hydrogen caused by a runaway greenhouse effect that evaporated the Venusian oceans, the same fate awaits Earth in about half a billion years from now ( much sooner if we burn all the coal as per current plans).
Not at all. There's two things to keep in mind. First, there isn't enough carbon in fossil fuels to do this thing. And even if there was, there isn't enough oxygen. There is probably enough fossil fuels, if one could somehow extract and burn it, to turn the Earth's atmosphere toxic to current human life. But that only takes about 5000 parts per million (0.5% by mass I think).
You can ask questions, but you can also answer them. For example, it doesn't take a lot of research to find out that Earth routinely gets hit by objects of this size. Cities don't make up a huge portion of the Earth's surface area, but if asteroids of this size were cratering the Earth, we'd have noticed it by now.
Surely 4-digit guy you've noticed the massive and growing hordes of libertarians, particularly over the last two years? Those willfully ignorant of everything and proud of it asshats make me miss the creationist hordes we used to have circa 2003.
I think the degree of psychological projection has certainly gotten worse over the years.
They did that. It was a terrible movie called "Mission to Mars" which ended up being more about product placement than going to Mars.
Also, why the emphasis on science? There's more to space than what we could learn about it.
It's just the biggest legal problem of all: conflict of interest.
I've seen a number of other such propositions when I was in California dealing with selective legalization of various forms of gambling. All written by the parties that would benefit from the resulting law.
Launching from near the Sun helps, if you have high thrust engines (for example, chemical, a amazingly efficient solar sail, nuclear propulsion, etc). The cause is the Oberth effect where you can get a huge boost from thrusting in a deep gravity well (cues jokes please) as long as you result in a trajectory that achieves escape velocity. It's primarily because you aren't pulling all that propellant out with you.
Unfortunately, current generation electric propulsion isn't high thrust to weight and hence, can't really exploit the Oberth effect very well.
We have certainly altered the biosphere of Earth, intentionally and unintentionally, but I personally wouldnâ(TM)t count that as terraforming in the most colloquial connotation. I get your point, but itâ(TM)s really usurping my comment to make a separate point.
An assertion that something is unlikely to happen is weakened significantly, if it has been done successfully and to considerable advantage elsewhere.
Look at the fall of the DDR and the cost to Germany during unification.
Two things to note. First, much of that cost was spurious, just bad decisions and ineffective spending. Second, Germany has done quite well economically since reunification. Part of it is relative fiscal discipline, but part of it is also having a piece of your country which you can raise from poverty to relative prosperity.
Because it is the right thing to do?
If South Korea can't afford to do that, then it's not the "right thing to do". I have to agree, this is empty moralizing wanking.
They can't do the work to improve their own conditions, when you lack roads to transport bricks or food or plumbing.
It's worth noting here that civilization came from far more primitive conditions than anything found in North Korea. Merely not having roads can be rectified by building roads.
The problem isn't that North Korea isn't capable of improving itself by itself all the way to cutting edge developed world standards. It is after all in a better position technologically and infrastructure-wise, than any developed world country was centuries ago and there are plenty of working examples of viable developed world societies to follow.
But the problem is that North Korea is going in the wrong direction to build such a society.
One of the problems with terraforming Mars (and potentially lots of other rocky, goldilocks zone planets) is the lack of a substantial magnetosphere.
If you're trying to make a nice environment for people to go from Earth, it's a problem. If you're merely trying to get life to thrive on Mars, then it's not a serious issue.The moderately high radioactive environment of Mars just isn't that big an issue (especially compared to the UV enivornment!). The low gravity of Mars does more to strip Mars of atmosphere than the lack of a magnetosphere.
Most likely humans will become largely virtual data based organisms long before we develop the technology or focused the resources on things like terraforming planets.
We already terraformed Earth. Agriculture and urbanization both make huge swathes of Earth more habitable for humans (which really should be the definition of terraforming not making something more like arbitrary Earth environments which in themselves need not be particularly nice environments. Nor is there a reason to expect that that the process can't be largely automated (to avoid the need for billions of human laborers making things happen).
There's some serious work here as well. Say I want my payload in a particular orbit, but I don't know how to get it there. A launch services provider could figure out some vehicle choices given my needs, calculate the trajectory and burns that would work, negotiate the launch contract and time on the launch pad, handle the packaging and delivery of the payload to the launch site, integrate payload onto a live rocket, and monitor the launch through to the desired trajectory.
Even SpaceX probably will end up doing a lot of work for third party launch service providers like Lockheed. It makes things simpler for SpaceX as well since all they have to do is provide the rocket.
I agree with Chuckstar here. Launches have always been automated. There's too much happening too fast and too far away from any potential human controller for human control to make any sort of sense.
The only sort of human control I've heard of is in the guidance of various sorts of missiles and other ordnance in the battlefield. For example, wire guided missiles (which are controlled by someone sitting right at the launch point) and target painting (where a spotter lights up in some way the designated target).
Those were different issues than copyright though.
I'd agree that they're different approaches. But different issues? I'm not sure of that. It seems to me that we have the same obvious problem that secondary markets drive down the price which people are willing to pay on the primary market.
So actors and reasons may be different (the policies I mentioned were implemented by political actors on behalf, presumably of the parties which were trying to reduce the effect of the secondary markets). But overall, it seems the same strategies apply.
If this were extended to homes as well then moving into a home would mean that's where you're going to live for the rest of your life (unless you have enough money to buy a 2nd or 3rd home).
It would mean a move to a disposable home. I think that would be horribly wasteful and hideously expensive for the homeowner, but it'd be easy street for the homebuilders. And to a modest extent, it does happen. Some bad home owners do pretty much destroy their homes and move on. And most homes aren't built to last more than a few decades.
Not arguing that classical music benefits hugely from having a good sound system set up, but I will argue that *good* rock/hip hop will benefit from a good sound system just as much. Any music that takes advantage of dynamic and acoustic ranges will benefit from a sound system that's capable of reproducing it.
You got me. I have to agree with that. Maybe some sort of drums solo or organ music. It's hard to get dynamic range with some instruments.
There's a pretty good argument that the core difference between spacex and the defense contractors is spacex is giving up hope, at a very basic level, of selling ICBMs to dotmil.
I disagree. The US hasn't made any new missiles since the Peacekeeper. That's about twenty years of no selling of ICBMs. Lockheed doesn't even have a rocket at the moment (the Atlas V is operated by ULA, which Lockheed is a part owner of).
My take is that Lockheed's niche here is launch services. If you want your payload in space, at some point, you're going to have to put it on a rocket. That's a very specialized task. And the period from launch through to successful deployment in the right trajectory remains one of the riskiest parts of a mission.